Wiki / Configuration Parameters

Specifies the delay between activity rounds for the background writer. In each round the writer issues writes for some number of dirty buffers (controllable by the following parameters). It then sleeps for the length of bgwriter_delay, and repeats. When there are no dirty buffers in the buffer pool, though, it goes into a longer sleep regardless of bgwriter_delay. If this value is specified without units, it is taken as milliseconds. The default value is 200 milliseconds (200ms). Note that on some systems, the effective resolution of sleep delays is 10 milliseconds; setting bgwriter_delay to a value that is not a multiple of 10 might have the same results as setting it to the next higher multiple of 10. This parameter can only be set in the postgresql.conf file or on the server command line.

English manual coverage begins with PostgreSQL 7.4. Source history and runtime observations have their own recorded version boundaries.

boot val

200

category

Resource Usage / Background Writer

context

sighup

documented

true

enumvals

Unknown

extra desc

Unknown

lang

en

max val

10000

metadata version

18

min val

10

name

bgwriter_delay

short desc

Background writer sleep time between rounds.

source

pg-settings-source-snapshot

unit

ms

vartype

integer